I'm very curious about Murdoch's business model of having readers pay for online content. The New York Times tried this a few years ago with their Time Select product. They decided to open their entire site for free to generate more Search Engine Traffic. Now, Murdoch is threatening to not make pages available to Google, so they won't get search engine traffic. Really??

I understand that their visitors would then have more value to advertisers. It's like comparing a cost-per-point from a news program to Springer. The type of audience matters.

Yet search is one of the ways the Internet is interactive. An inactive reader is great for branding... maybe. Right now, it's still difficult the measure the results of branded display campaigns.

The good news about half in the US would pay for content, according to the NYTimes. That's a much higher number than I would expect. Yet, people only want to pay $3 per month.

We're in for an interesting road ahead, as the business models for newspapers evolves. It reminds me of the early days of cable TV, when the mindset was customers did not want to pay for TV.